Aligned sentence by sentence
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Part One · Chapter Fifty-Eight — Negative Attributes and the Impossibility of Positive Predication
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More subtle than what preceded.
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Know that describing God, mighty and exalted, through negations is the correct description — to which no concession at all attaches, and in which there is no deficiency with respect to God under any circumstance whatsoever. As for describing Him through positive attributes, in it there is the association and deficiency that we have already explained.
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I should first explain to you how negations are attributes in a certain respect, and in what way they differ from positive attributes; and after that I shall explain to you how we have no path in describing Him except through negations alone.
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I say: an attribute is not only that which specifies the described such that nothing else shares it in that attribute; rather, an attribute may also be an attribute of the described even if others share it, so that no complete specification is achieved by it. For example, if you saw a man from a distance and asked, 'What is this visible thing?' and it was said to you, 'An animal' — that is undoubtedly an attribute of this visible thing, even though it does not distinguish it from everything else; yet some specification is achieved by it, namely that this visible thing is not a body of the plant genus nor of the mineral genus. Likewise, if a man were in this house, and you knew that some body was in it but did not know what it was, and you asked, 'What is in this house?' and the respondent said, 'There is no mineral in it nor any plant body' — some specification has been achieved, and you know that there is an animal in it, even if you do not know which animal it is. In this respect, negative attributes share with positive attributes, because they necessarily achieve some specification — even if the only specification in them is the removal of what was negated from among what we had supposed was not negated. But the way in which negative attributes differ from positive attributes is that positive attributes, even if they do not specify, nevertheless indicate a part of the thing whose knowledge is sought — either a part of its substance or an accident among its accidents. Whereas negative attributes teach us nothing whatsoever about the essence whose knowledge is sought, except perhaps incidentally, as we illustrated.
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After this introduction I say: it has been demonstrated that God, mighty and exalted, is the Necessarily Existent in whom there is no composition — as we shall prove. We apprehend only His thatness (anniyya) alone, not His quiddity. Therefore it is impossible that He have a positive attribute; for He has no thatness outside His quiddity, such that the attribute would indicate one of the two. Far from His quiddity being composite, such that the attribute would indicate its parts — far from His having accidents, such that the attribute would indicate those too. Therefore no positive attribute whatsoever.
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As for the negative attributes — these are those that ought to be used to guide the mind to what ought to be believed about Him, exalted be He; for they involve no multiplicity from their side in any way, and they guide the mind toward the utmost of what a human being can apprehend of Him, exalted be He. For example: the necessity of the existence of something other than those essences apprehensible by the senses and comprehended in knowledge by the intellect has been demonstrated to us. So we said of this: it is existent — meaning, its non-existence is impossible. Then we apprehended that this existent is not like the existence of the elements, for instance, which are lifeless bodies; so we said: it is living — meaning He, exalted be He, is not dead. Then we apprehended that this existent is also not like the existence of the heaven, which is a living body; so we said: He is not a body. Then we apprehended that this existent is not like the existence of the intellect, which is neither body nor dead, but is a caused thing; so we said: He, exalted be He, is eternal — meaning, He has no cause that brought Him into existence. Then we apprehended that this existent — whose existence, which is His essence, is not sufficient only for Him to exist, but numerous existents overflow from Him — and this is not like the overflow of heat from fire or the necessity of light from the sun; rather it is an overflow that sustains them always, in permanence and orderly arrangement through a wise governance, as we shall explain — so we said of Him, on account of these meanings, that He is powerful, knowing, and willing; and the intent of these attributes is that He is not powerless, not ignorant, not heedless, and not negligent. And the meaning of our saying 'not powerless' is that His existence contains in itself sufficiency to bring other things into existence. And the meaning of our saying 'not ignorant' is that He is apprehending — that is, living; for every apprehending thing is living. And the meaning of our saying 'not heedless and not negligent' is that all those existents proceed in orderly arrangement and governance, not abandoned and occurring haphazardly, but as everything governed by one who wills proceeds, by design and will. Then we apprehended that this existent has no other like it; so we said: He is one — meaning, the negation of multiplicity.
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It has thus become clear to you that every attribute by which we describe Him is either an attribute of action, or its meaning is the negation of its absence — if the intent is to apprehend His essence, not His action. And one should not employ these negations nor apply them to Him, exalted be He, except in the manner you have learned — that a thing may be negated of something to which it is not fitting to exist, as we say of the wall: 'not sighted.'
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You who study this treatise know that this heaven — a moving body that we have measured and spanned, and whose dimensions we have comprehended in their parts and whose motions we have mostly mastered — our intellects have completely failed to apprehend its quiddity; even though we know that it necessarily has matter and form, only that its matter is not like this matter that is in us. Therefore we cannot describe it except through indefinite names, not through determinate positive predication: we say, the heaven is not light, not heavy, not acted upon, and therefore does not receive an impression, has no taste, has no smell — and the like of these negations. All this is because of our ignorance of that matter. How then will the state of our intellects be when they seek to apprehend the Creator, stripped of matter, simple in the extreme of simplicity, the Necessarily Existent who has no cause, to whom no meaning additional to His perfect essence accrues — the meaning of whose perfection is the negation of deficiencies, as we have explained? For we apprehend nothing of Him but His thatness alone; and there is an existent unlike anything among the existents He brought into being, sharing with them no meaning whatsoever, with no multiplicity in Him and no incapacity to bring into existence what is other than He. His relation to the world is like the relation of the helmsman to the ship — and even this is not a true relation or a correct resemblance; it is only for guiding the mind that He, exalted be He, governs the existents — meaning He sustains them and preserves their order as is fitting. And this meaning will be explained more fully than this.
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Glory be to Him — when intellects contemplate His essence, their apprehension turns to incapacity; when they contemplate the chain of His acts from His will, their knowledge turns to ignorance; and when tongues seek to exalt Him through descriptions, all eloquence turns to helplessness.